Unlock a node in Alfresco which could not be unlocked

I had an issue recently when i was trying to edit a word document. I deleted the working copy node somehow. I have no clues how it happend. But this word document node was locked foreever. Cancel checkout action was always failing. I was not able to cancel checkout and unlock the node.

While i was investigating the issue, i looked for the nodeRef of the word document via node browser. I found that it had cm:checkedOut aspect (because i checkedOut for edit oboviously).

I thought removing the aspect and unlocking will solve my problem. I tried to remove cm:checkedOut aspect from the node via repository js webscript but it failed. 

In my further investigation i reviewed, org.alfresco.service.cmr.coci.CheckOutCheckInService.cancelCheckout(NodeRef) method defintion in CheckOutCheckInService class:

public NodeRef cancelCheckout(NodeRef workingCopyNodeRef);

It indicated that, it expects workingCopyNode in order to cancel the checkout.

To unlock the node i have to somehow remove the cm:checkout aspect and then unlock the node. 

When i investigated more in logs (enabled the debug log on org.alfresco.repo.coci package), i saw that on click of Cancel Checkout, a backend behavior (org.alfresco.repo.coci.CheckOutCheckInServicePolicies.BeforeCancelCheckOut) was stopping the process. The below given method seemd to be validating working copy node by firing org.alfresco.repo.coci.CheckOutCheckInServicePolicies.BeforeCancelCheckOut.beforeCancelCheckOut(NodeRef) behavior.

org.alfresco.repo.coci.CheckOutCheckInServiceImpl.invokeBeforeCancelCheckOut(NodeRef)

The above validation was happening before the unlock (org.alfresco.service.cmr.lock.LockService.unlock(NodeRef, boolean, boolean)) method call. 

So i decided to disable the behaviors and then unlock the node followed by aspect removal. Here is the fix:

function main () { 
 //using the string nodeRef of the word document which was locked.
 var nodeRef = search.findNode("workspace://SpacesStore/7c093a3d-c16e-416d-8087-9ccd93aa2a06");
 var webContext = Packages.org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.getCurrentWebApplicationContext();
 var behaviourFilter = webContext.getBean("policyBehaviourFilter", org.alfresco.repo.policy.BehaviourFilter);
  
 // Disable all behaviors, so we can remove the aspect without any validations
 behaviourFilter.disableAllBehaviours();
 // Remove cm:checkedOut aspect and try to unlock the node which was not getting unlocked due to behavior validations
 nodeRef.removeAspect("cm:checkedOut");
 nodeRef.unlock();
 // Enable all the behaviors
 behaviourFilter.enableAllBehaviours(); 

}

main();